Ted Williams hit .406 for the entire 1941 season. He is the last Major League player to hit .400 for a whole year.

From the start of baseball’s modern era (1900) until Bill Terry hit .401 in 1930, there were 11 occurrences of a player hitting .400 or more. Williams was the first and last .400 hitter after Terry.
After Williams’s Red Sox lost to the Indians on May 16, 1941, he was hitting a perfectly respectable .333, but between the May 17 and May 25, he went 19 for 39, and lifted his average to .404. Williams was hitting above .400 for the entire month of June, but he hit a “soft spell” at the beginning of July, and by July 19 his average was down to .393. That was his low point for the remainder of the the season. He was hitting exactly .400 on July 25, and he never got below that level for the rest of the way.
After a 3 for 5 game on September 7, Williams’s average spiked to .413, and he appeared to be cruising to a .400 season, but going into the last day Williams had slid back to .400 again.
The 1941 season ended with the Red Sox playing the A’s in a doubleheader at Shibe Park (later renamed Connie Mack Stadium) in Philadelphia. At that point in the season the Red Sox were in second place, but the Yankees had long since run away with the American League Pennant and had a 17 game lead over Boston. For what little it was worth, the Red Sox’ second place finish was also a done deal. Chicago was seven games behind them in third place. And the A’s certainly weren’t going anywhere. They were in dead last place, seven games behind the seventh place Washington Senators.

Williams’ actual batting average before the final double header was 0.399553571428571, which of course rounds to .400.

It’s doubtful that anybody would have cared if Williams sat out the whole double header in order to secure his .400 average, but “Teddy Ballgame” wouldn’t have any parts of that.
He went 4-5 in the opener (three singles and a home run, and two RBIs). That took his average up to .404. As long as Williams didn’t go 0-6 in the second game, he was going to be a .400 hitter. As it turned out, he went 2-3 and wound up the season hitting 0.405701754, or was we say four-oh-six!

19 Years later, in his last at-bat of his last game, Ted Williams hit the 521st home run of his career.

January 3, 1920, Announcement – – Babe Ruth Sold to Yankees by Red Sox for $125,000.

In 1919 Babe Ruth smashed the major league home run record, hitting 29 round-trippers. He broke the record held by Gavvy Cravath, who hit 24 for the Phillies in 1915. Before Ruth hit his 29 homers in 1919, the American League record was only 12.

From The NY Times Babe Ruth of the Boston Red Sox, baseball’s super slugger, was purchased by the Yankees yesterday for the largest cash sum ever paid for a player. The New York club paid Harry Frazee of Boston $125,000 for the sensational batsman who last season caused such a furore in the national game by batting out twenty-nine home runs, a new record in long distance clouting.Read more

From the Miami NewsThe most popular indoor sport in New York today was guessing how much the New York Americans (Yankees) paid for George (Babe) Ruth, the home run monarch. The nearest approach to anything of an official nature was the smiling admission of Col. Jacob Ruppert, the Yankees president, that he understood that an offer of $100,000 for Ruth was refused by Harry Frazee, of the Boston Club. Read more

Popularly held myth that Red Sox Owner Harry Frazee used the Money from the Sale of Babe Ruth to finance the Broadway Musical, “No No Nanette”, is debunked

From Americanpopularculture.com In 1917, Broadway producer Harry Frazee bought the Red Sox. On January 3, 1920, he made baseball’s most notorious swap, sending the Babe to the Yankees for $100,000 in cash and a $300,000 loan. This move started the alleged “Curse of the Bambino,” a spell supposedly responsible for the sequence of calamities since then. Legend has it that he made the deal to finance the hit show No, No Nanette.
Not true. At the time of the Ruth trade. the show’s author, Vincent Youmans, was an unknown rehearsal pianist, and the musical had not been written. No, No Nanette first appeared on Broadway more than five years after the trade, and the two had no direct connection.

The Curse of the Bambino is Also a Myth

The “Curse” rose to prominence back in 1990, when Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy penned a historical book about the Red Sox. Looking for a way to spruce up 70 years of rehashed stories, Shaughnessy borrowed a Scituate preacher’s theory that the Red Sox had been haunted ever since they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. It was a cute, efficient way to weave together every Sox-related heartbreak over the past eight decades. It also placed Shaughnessy on the map, made him a best-selling author and put his kids through college (to steal a line from local radio personality Gerry Callahan).From ESPN.com Read more

Babe Ruth’s Jersey Sells in 2012 For 40 Times What Babe Sold For

A New York Yankees road jersey worn by the Sultan of Swat in the 1920s sold for a whopping $4.4 million, setting a world record for any sports memorabilia item.
California-based SCP Auctions handled the sale of George Herman “Babe” Ruth’s jersey, which officially came in at $4,415,658.
A New York Yankees road jersey worn by the Sultan of Swat in the 1920s sold for a whopping $4.4 million, setting a world record for any sports memorabilia item. California-based SCP Auctions handled the sale of George Herman “Babe” Ruth’s jersey, which officially came in at $4,415,658.From the NY Daily News, Read more